Slashdot Mirror
Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap, Says Oculus Cofounder (palmerluckey.com)
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear. He writes: The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their current offering is a tragedy in the classical sense, even more so when you consider how their massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room in the AR space. It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality. It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
Dammit, I wanted that VC money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
well yeah, kinda understandable given the amount that went to ML for the overhyped crap they have produced. I would be kinda pissed too if I was in that industry and fighting for investment with a real product and watched it all go to them.
IIRC Oculus didn't have that much trouble getting funded, for both their initial product and subsequent developments. The article reads as a fair rundown of what Magic Leap is about and how it stacks up to the hype. Conclusion: it doesn't. Magic Leap had all the hallmarks of a classic Silicon Valley scam: incredibly impressive mock-ups coupled with impenetrable secrecy and no details on their actual product whatsoever, landing a few big fish in VC funding and dropping their names to convince other investors to attend their privileged, exclusive dog&pony shows. They promised a world-shaking game changer in AR technology, and turned out to be a mediocre also-ran with pretty much no new tech to offer. If I were one of the investors, I'd be cranky too.
So yeah, I'd rather have seen all that funding go to Oculus instead... except that they're now owned by Satan.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear.
Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality.
That is unfortunately a fair description of most VR technology that has ever been developed in the last 30 years. The hype has always exceeded the reality substantially even as far back as the early 1990s (see the movie Lawnmower Man back in 1992 for an example of the hype train in the form of a terrible movie). Understand that I used to make my living with VR tech and it has a soft spot in my heart. But the market potential of VR has been blown WAY out of proportion to the reality of it. AR is a huge market. VR not so much, particularly the bits requiring an immersive headset. Where VR is useful it's incredibly helpful but literally every application of it is the very definition of a niche market.
It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
AR != VR so I'm not really sure what he's on about. If investors are confusing the two then they are morons. But frankly most of the AR investment seems quite healthy because it's being done by companies like Google, Apple, and the like. You'll note that aside from Facebook, none of the other big tech companies are worried much about VR but they are spending a LOT of money on AR because there are vast, obvious, and hugely profitable applications for the tech. The closest VR comes to a mass market application is for games but even that is still a pretty small population segment and market compared to AR technology. AR tech includes all sorts of location aware smartphone tech, heads up displays, self driving and driver assisting car tech, warehousing, skilled trades, and so much more. VR is useful for some games and a few niche simulations like flight simulators and other training applications plus a bit of marketing. I'm not saying VR is useless, just that it's a smaller market opportunity than AR. Orders of magnitude smaller.
Is Palmer Luckey talking about Magic Leap or Oculus Rift rift here?
The way he blew the Rift launch is one of the most epic failures in tech history. To start with so much hype and so much VC and such a market lead. Then to putter around wasting years, pissing off the fanbase with constant delays and a complete lack of communication, string people along expecting a launch any day a year before the product hit the street. Then to release it at more than double the price he had said it would cost and completely kill the early adoption, handing the market to the competition that was at one point years behind. Only to have repeated price cuts the first year as nobody cared to buy at his insanely high price point. And let's not forget him selling out to facebook in the middle of all this.
Palmer Lucky has got to be one of the last people anyone should be listening to in the VR industry.
The full quote:
The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications.
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system.
Well aside from the fact that you cut off the most relevant parts of the quote (sentences stop with a full stop not a comma), even if they did put out a solid product that wouldn't change anything. They didn't promise a solid product, they promised to change the world and blow minds, sucking up investment capital that could have better spent elsewhere.
> And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support
There are dozens of us. DOZENS!